The more that science establishes genetic bases for differences of aptitudes and even of attitudes and desires, the more pressure there will be for government actions to remedy the unfairness of life’s lottery. Many of these pressures, however, will be opportunistic—old agendas seeking, through science, new momentum for respect. And it is not obvious why political power should be put in the service of ironing out differences that are, strictly speaking, natural. Nevertheless, the science of genetics is joining the social sciences in complicating our understanding of what equality of opportunity means. For example, as the acquisition and manipulation of information becomes more important to individuals’ prosperity, life becomes more regressive. This is because the benefits of information accrue disproportionately to those who are already favored by natural aptitudes and aptitudes acquired through education and other socialization. It is, however, not necessarily unfortunate when a society experiences considerable cognitive stratification. After all, we actually do want the gifted and accomplished to ascend to positions that give scope to their talents. As Robert Frost said, “I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”54 What is unfortunate is when the transmission of cognitive aptitudes and skills becomes so much a matter of the transmission of family advantages that a child’s prospects can be largely predicted by information about his or her parents.
Americans have long fancied that ours is a middle-class society without other significant, calcified class distinctions, a society open to upward mobility. Americans have been reluctant, and hence slow, to recognize what the sociologist Richard Sennett called the “hidden injuries of class.”55 This reluctance is, however, receding, for at least two reasons. One is apparent to the middle class as it looks down with alarm; the other is apparent to the middle class as it looks up with envy and resentment. After more than half a century of attempts at ameliorative social policies, it is undeniable that there exists an underclass trapped by the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Furthermore, the middle class believes, and is not mistaken, that as society becomes more technocratic and complex, and more given to rewarding cognitive elites, those elites become more adept at entrenching themselves by passing their advantages on to their children.
As modern society has moved—somewhat—away from assigning status and opportunity on the basis of kinship, patronage, or class, it has sought quantitative measurements to enable society to be one of, in Napoleon’s phrase, “careers open to talents.”56 But even as a meritocratic society seeks to assign rewards on the basis of impersonal and objective standards, kinship, patronage, and especially class creep back in on little cat’s feet. As the sociologist Daniel Bell warned nearly fifty years ago, “There can never be a pure meritocracy because high-status parents will invariably seek to pass on their positions, either through the use of influence or simply by the cultural advantages their children inevitably possess. Thus after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.”57 The cultural advantages are so potent that the resort to crass influence becomes of diminishing importance.
To the extent that a meritocratic society measures and rewards intelligence, and to the extent that differences in intelligence result from genetic inheritances, to that extent a society of truly equal opportunity is a receding chimera. Meritocracy, in theory, seems at first to be the translation of the conditions of modernity into the spirit of democracy. In practice, however, meritocratic aspirations are apt to result in a hierarchal society that seems especially ruthless because it is produced by impersonal, supposedly scientific processes. It is a society in which social standing is supposedly the result of objective credentialing. So, those who do not flourish are apt to feel a special bitterness: They are denied the consolations of concluding that the competition was inherently unfair.
In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argued that “inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved.”58 Therefore, he said, social benefits accruing to persons because of such endowments are justified if, but only if, the prospering of the fortunate also improves the lot of those who are less lucky. This moral imperative sweeps broadly because Rawls had a capacious conception of what counts as a “natural” endowment. He included not just intelligence, physical beauty, and innate aptitudes for, say, music or mathematics, but also advantages resulting from a more nurturing family setting. The Rawlsean imperative requires a government that relentlessly pursues a “fair” distribution of social rewards. This, of course, guarantees an exhausting politics of constant distributional conflict. And how would government equalize the influence of the factions that try to use democratic measures—persuasion; mass mobilization—to influence government decision-making? If some political participants are more skillful and articulate than others, what is to be done?
One should avoid promiscuously bandying accusations of incipient “totalitarianism.” It is, however, clear that any government true to the Rawlsean imperative would have to intensely monitor and closely micromanage not only economic transactions but even social interactions. And the family, the primary transmitter of social capital, would have to be considered an inherent rival of, and impediment to, a determinedly egalitarian government. This is why apparently anodyne bromides about “leveling the playing field” can license much mischief. Government should tread lightly when it ventures into the fraught debate about how, if at all, the transmission of family advantages should be regulated or impeded.
Besides, although cognitive stratification and other causes of income inequality make America in some ways less egalitarian, do not ignore some hugely egalitarian aspects of modernity. Anyone can have as much access to the Internet as Bill Gates has; Jeff Bezos and you have the same access to one of the twentieth century’s greatest blessings, antibiotics. The devices and medicines that have vast leveling effects on the distribution of well-being have been produced by cognitive elites whose capabilities are not resented by the multitudes who benefit from the results of those capabilities. This is so in spite of the fact that as the acquisition and manipulation of information becomes more important to individuals’ prosperity, life becomes more regressive: The benefits of information accrue disproportionately to those who are already favored by natural aptitudes and by other characteristics acquired through education and socialization.
Two centuries ago, the great source of wealth in America was land. It was so plentiful that eventually, with the Homestead Act of 1862, it was essentially given away. A century ago, the distinctive source of wealth was heavy fixed capital: Think of Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central railroad, and then Henry Ford’s River Rouge assembly plant. Today’s distinctive source of wealth is what is called human capital—knowledge, information, cognitive skills. Although these are widely distributed by nature and augmented by universal free public education, there are limits to how much education—even if competently conducted, which it not always is—can do to equalize the ability of individuals to thrive in a competitive society.
In a society where material well-being has become more or less universal, or at least where severe material deprivation has become rare, competition for cultural advantages has intensified. This is only partly because many such advantages, such as education at elite institutions, have considerable cash value over a lifetime of earning. As societies become wealthier, and basic needs are supplied and insecurities are assuaged, monetary measurements become less useful as measures of individual welfare. Today, Christopher DeMuth notes, government’s principal activity consists of transferring income from workers to nonworkers for the subsidization of two things that were virtually unknown just a few generations ago: nonwork (retirement, extended schooling, extended disability payments) and ambitious medical care (replaceable body parts, exotic diagnostic and pharmacological technologies). The Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey is correct that “the triumph over scarcity shifted the primary focus of liberal egalitarianism from lack of material resources to lack of cultural acceptan
ce.”59 In 1943, the behavioral scientist Abraham Maslow introduced the idea that human beings have a “hierarchy of needs.” At the base of “Maslow’s pyramid” are physiological imperatives—needs for food, shelter, nourishment, safety, and sex. In advanced societies, people have advanced needs. These include what Maslow called “belonging needs,” such as acceptance and affiliations. Then come “esteem needs,” such as self-respect and social status. And at the pyramid’s apex is the need for what Maslow called “self-actualization,” meaning a sense of fulfillment. In developed societies where the satisfaction of physiological needs is taken for granted, the “higher” needs become political subjects, and the satisfaction of such needs becomes a political agenda. Politics follows society’s ascent up the pyramid.
As broad considerations of economic class have lost political importance, considerations of ethnicity, sex, culture, and religion have become more salient. This is why welfare-state answers to the basic questions about material distributive justice have not calmed our politics. Quite different concerns, even more passionately fought over, have broadened the range of political argument. Americans have always been torn between two desires: for absence of restraint and for a sense of community. As the nation’s social pyramid becomes steeper, those closer to the base than to the apex feel increasingly at the mercy of governing and media elites who do not seem to be elites of character as well as of achievement. People measure fine character, in part, by shared values. In most societies, most of the time, the most basic values are not much thought about. If questioned, they elicit what sociologists have called “of course” statements, which express the community’s “world-taken-for-granted.” A dubious achievement of the culture shaped by today’s elites has been to diminish the “world-taken-for-granted.” Questions that touch the quick of our existence, such as the nature of a well-lived life and the meaning of sex, recently did, but no longer do, elicit “of course” answers.
In this context of cultural disorientation, government tried to engineer outcomes less tangible and more complicated than physical infrastructure. It decided it could deliver more ambitious forms of assistance. As the journalist Max Ways once wrote: “At the time when St. Francis impulsively gave his fine clothes to a beggar, nobody seems to have been very interested in what happened to the beggar. Was he rehabilitated? Did he open a small business? Or was he to be found next day, naked again, in an Assisi gutter, having traded the clothes for a flagon of Orvieto? These were not the sorts of questions that engaged the medieval mind. The twentieth century has developed a more ambitious definition of what it means to help somebody.”60
As Moynihan said in this chapter’s epigraph, politics can change culture, on which a society’s success depends. But although politics can save culture from itself, it also can damage the culture. It has done so by destigmatizing dependency for the purpose of universalizing it. In this cultural context, there might even be a cultural contradiction in education, which is supposed to equip individuals for lives of confident independence. The more educated a nation becomes, the wealthier it is apt to become, and the wealthier it becomes, the more benefits its government can dispense to the citizenry. The wealthier the citizens become, the more they pay in taxes, and the more benefits they expect from government. So, although prosperity makes people confident and assertive, and gives them the means to be self-sufficient, it is not conducive to small government or to self-sufficiency. So perhaps democratic life undermines the prerequisites of democracy. It produces first a toleration of dependency, then a hunger for it, and finally an insistence that dependency is a fundamental right.
As dependency on government for various entitlements has grown, so has another kind of dependency. A perverse form of entrepreneurship is spawned as economic interests maneuver to become dependent on government-provided opportunities. As people become more deft at doing so, government becomes an engine of unearned inequality. This is especially a peril in successful societies. Mancur Olson warned that the longer a successful society is stable, the more numerous are the successful factions—not the poor, or the unemployed, or the new entrepreneurial risk-takers who are trying to gain a foothold against established competitors—who become deft at gaming the political system for advantages.61 These include domestic protectionism in the form of occupational licensure; or regulations that are more burdensome to newer and smaller entrants into a market than to large, wealthy corporations; or international protection in the form of tariffs and import quotas. More and more factions figure out how to prosper by achieving distributional advantages through politics. And society slowly succumbs to energy-sapping sclerosis. Prevention of this requires a political ethic that stigmatizes rent-seeking, and an engaged judiciary that is not too timid to declare some of these practices to be unconstitutional because they violate enumerated rights to due process and equal protection of the laws, and such unenumerated rights as the right to apply one’s talents to earning a living.
“MOST THINGS ARE NEVER MEANT”
Conservatism’s foundational instruction is that we should be cognizant of, comfortable with, and respectful of, complexity. “The nature of man,” said Burke, “is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature or the quality of his affairs.”62 This is why (in a maxim formulated by a scientist and systems analyst, Jay W. Forrester, and frequently cited by Moynihan) this is true: “With a high degree of confidence we can say that the intuitive solution to the problems of complex social systems will be wrong most of the time.”63 Hence Moynihan’s complaint when a witness before a congressional committee gave testimony that had “all the clarity of logic but none of the fuzziness and grit and dirt and detail of reality.”64 Moynihan served in government during the vaulting ambitions associated with John Kennedy’s New Frontier and, even more, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Looking back in disappointment, Moynihan recalled that the 1964 election seemed to promise the “direct transmission of social science into governmental policy.”65 Social science knew, or thought it did, how to “manage” the economy to maximize employment, and it assumed that employment was a reliable predictor of healthy family structures. If macroeconomic trends are not the decisive influence, what is? The answer is: Many things that were jettisoned as American society embarked upon a great adventure of liberation, pursuing what can be called the Shelley ecstasy:
The painted veil is…torn aside;
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself…66
Today’s culture is a reason for thinking that perhaps people should be a bit more circumscribed by manners and mores, and would be improved by a pinch of awe about something other than their own splendor. America’s normally sunny disposition has become clouded by anxieties about the uses to which freedom is being put. Libertarian conservatives and social conservatives occasionally are at daggers drawn, but libertarians need social conservatives. Social conservatives are concerned with society’s moral ecology, and with the families, schools, churches, and other mediating institutions that nurture it. These are prerequisites for liberty being put to worthy uses—for, that is, what the Constitution’s preamble calls the “blessings” of liberty. Remember Walter Lippmann proclaiming in 1914 progressivism’s determination to “put intention where custom has reigned.”67 Today’s America has ample evidence that when you shed customs, you get accelerating social regression. Customs are normative; they affirm some behaviors and stigmatize others. When norms come to be considered optional or, worse, repressive, liberty degenerates into license, which is not a blessing.
“Most things are never meant.” That is the first line of the last stanza of Philip Larkin’s melancholy, almost despairing poem “Going, Going” (1972), in which he says goo
dbye to all that England had been before modernity overwhelmed it: “England gone/The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,/The guildhalls, the carved choirs.”68 The poem is, as it says, perhaps the poet feeling “age, simply.” He was forty-nine; he died at sixty-three. There is, however, a more cheerful implication of the great truth that “most things are never meant.” It is a central insight of conservatism that most social arrangements, from families to communities to commercial systems, are not meant. They are not the results of conscious intentions, of premeditation, of design. Rather, they are the results of swarms of independent variables that defy subordination to supervision. The uncheerful aspect of this is that when unintended arrangements, such as families, are unintentionally weakened to the point of disintegration, no one knows how to put them back together. What made the desolation of the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s so shocking was not that it was a slum but that in living memory it had not been. As Moynihan said, “In the 1930s, the Bronx was known as ‘the city without a slum’” and was “the one place in the whole of the nation where commercial housing was built during the Great Depression.” Then came social regression, “an Armageddonic collapse that I do not believe has its equal in the history of urbanization.”69 Reversing social regression by using public policies that create, or re-create, a healthy culture is a challenge at home akin to “nation building” abroad. It is not theoretically impossible; it is, however, beyond our current abilities.
The Conservative Sensibility Page 41